FABULOUS FELINE SATURDAY
Into every author’s life, the day will come when you open that morning’s email to find one that contains Questions From Your Publisher That Must Be Answered Today. This is especially likely the closer the book gets to going to the printer, after which necessary changes can’t be made and you’re likely to fall victim to The Tillman Rule identified by my good friend Barrett Tillman thus: the worst typos will survive any number of copy editing passes and become totally obvious the day the book is released in print.
Yesterday was one of those days, so Fabulous Feline Friday is Fabulous Feline Saturday this week. The good news yesterday was that in addition to (hopefully) catching all those things that make authors look like idiots in print, I also got a Foreword for this book about the fighter pilots of the Eighth Air Force from the last surviving Eighth Air Force fighter ace, 101-year old Brigadier General (Ret) Clarence “Bud” Anderson, which I had begun to think wasn’t going to happen.
So, on to Fabulous Feline Saturday.
Back in the 90s, I had a car accident that stopped me writing for eighteen months because of nerve damage to my left arm that left me unable to type. Losing “momentum” in Hollywood leads quickly to “losing that career gig” and as a result I found myself no longer living in my cool little house on Mount Washington, and instead living in a one-bedroom apartment in Not The Best Neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley. Right next to the apartment building was an auto repair shop. One night, I discovered an out-of-the-ordrinary grey cat had taken up residence under the pickup truck backed up against the fence where the building’s trash bin was.
Over the next month, the cat and I got to know each other, and it became obvious that this very nice kitty was not a feral - she had been abandoned. So finally, one night when I coaxed her close to the barred fence with some dinner, I reached through, grabbed her, pulled her through the fence and kidnaped her up to my apartment.
She was a very different-looking cat. The definition of “smokey.” Which became her name and I later discovered she was a very rare breed, a “Blue Smoke.” When you looked at her, she would shed a cloud of fur, and there were three kinds of fur on her as I discovered petting her. This is what created her very different-looking markings.
Smokey was a chow hound. If a human ate it, she was interested in it.
She was also a very polite lady.
I don’t know how old she was when I found her, other than she was a full-size adult, but she lived with me and then with me and Jurate for the next 18 years.
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As an inveterate cat hound, lol, proud parent to Lion (New Hampshire born, 1982); Lucy and sister Nelly (Washington, D.C. born 1996) and currently Yolanda (Harlem born feral, 2008), I can say this photo montage you’ve put together is a Winner. Thanks for giving us a well-earned break from the world of sucky humans.
wait for it, TC. Two Fun Facts. #1 Back in my youth (mid to late twenties) this reader of Another Fine Mess failed FLAT National Geographic's copyediting test to write captions. Captions! Failed the test not once, but twice, and gloriously.
Then, perhaps as a reminder that it could have been worse many, many years later, when I published my first book, I had a final copy editor who--seriously--went straight through my manuscript and changed every single semi-colon to a dash. This is a true story.
I am either ashamed or terribly proud to report, knowing that it would go from there directly to the printer, I went right back through and changed them all back.
You, sir, are a marvel. Your book sounds exciting and, having read enough here to be aware of your skills in the comfortable handling of language and ideas, I will look forward to reading it.
What a parade of cats. Thank God they can read; it does broaden one's horizon.